A football question-please ignore if you have no interest!

I see on another thread there is a mention of football! Hope it’s OK to start a specific one.
Does anyone else follow the beautiful game? Although I was raised as a West Ham fan I’m a non-league sort of guy these days. My team, Hampton & Richmond Borough of the National League South, are having a (cough!) “transitional” season in that we lost our manager and the backbone of the side to another club in the summer. All a bit depressing as we made the playoff final last season. Who are your teams and how are they doing at the moment?

Comments

Birmingham City – active supporter since 1968.
Two places outside the playoffs. Gary Monk doing superb job as manager with no money to spend.
Punching above our weight with a first team squad of about 18.
FFFP hearing in February in which it is suggested we will get a 12 point deduction.
Ah well, as long as we stop in division and stay afloat there is always next season.

It really rankles with me that so many clubs overspend to the degree that you guys have, particularly when the team in question took one of our players because we couldn’t afford to pay the wages that the other team were offering. Birmingham took our captain, Marc Roberts, last season. Although I don’t think he’s been a hit at St Andrews yet, he was a key player at Barnsley and I don’t think we’d have gone down had we kept him. What’s more, he’s a local lad and a childhood Reds fan. So for a club like us, who live within our means, to lose a player to a club £37m in debt because we can’t afford to pay the wages that they will, is hard to take. It’s time the FA started taking this seriously.

It’s happened a lot over the years though. We once lost our leading scorer to Bolton, as we couldn’t match the wages on offer. Yet Bolton were £178m in debt or something crazy. But it’s not a coincidence that the teams that don’t overspend in the Championship and actually show a profit are usually the teams to go down. I dare say that had Birmingham not overspent by £37m then we wouldn’t have gone down, you would have. But the points penalty you are likely to get will be applied this season, which is no good to the teams that were cheated last year, when the overspending occurred.

It’s even worse at the top though, where teams like Bournemouth, Leicester, QPR and Wolves all overspend to get promoted and then get a token financial penalty which is a drop in the ocean compared to the riches they get for being in the Premiership. It’s what convinces teams like Birmingham, Bolton and Sheffield Wednesday to overspend. The way that money has ruined the game, along with the staggering amount of cheating that has crept into the game, is what has totally turned me off the game, to the point that I don’t watch any football on TV any more, including the World Cup (when not watching Barnsley I get my other football kicks watching my local non-league team, Penistone Church, who are having a great season). The game just sickens me. It is good, however, to see that ‘Arry Redknapp is keeping up his record of leaving clubs in financial ruin. Club accountants must be terrified as soon as he walks through the door!

…sorry @stevet, reading this back makes it look like I’m having a pop at you, which is far from the case. I just despair at the state of football and the sheer amount of clubs in the top couple of divisions that have done what your club has done, when rules have apparently been brought in to prevent this by the toothless football authorities.

No offence taken Paul. I also despair of football and to be honest only watch Birmingham and the Prem can do one – Prima Donnas all of them.
Roberts hasn’t been brilliant for us to be honest – got off to a shaky start. Played better under Monk but currently injured.

Our problems started when The Golds and Sullivan sold to a Chinese crook who past the fit and proper test. So you tell me? Does the club have to take all the blame or do the football league take some responsibility too?
The prize for reaching the Premiership is too big which as you say encourages clubs to chase the dream.
When Sullivan/Golds were in charge the club were profitable and still reached the Premier league and one Carling Cup final but fell just short until Bruce took them up. Where they were smart they sold the club for double its valuation to a Chinese crook with dirty money who was prepared to gamble on a dream.
Who pays for this? Let’s see, the supporters.

Yep, as owners come and go and, let’s face it, as players come and go, the only constant is us lot on the terraces, no matter how many players kiss the badge and say they love the club. That was one of the sad things about Roberts leaving. We must have been the only club where the owner, the manager and the captain were all boyhood Reds fans. But our owner died, the manager went to get his millions for three months at Leeds and you lot took our captain to warm your bench!

Roberts is from our small town, just outside Barnsley, and actually started out in the youth side at the local non-league team, as did Chris Morgan and John Stones (we breed centre backs round here, in fact, Jason Shackell, Gerry Taggart and Phil Jagielka all lived close by!). We still see Roberts round here occasionally (as I type, his cousin’s lad is tearing round the house with my son) and he was in the crowd at Penistone Church last season when they ‘giant-killed’ Whitby Town in the FA Cup. He’s a big lad, great in the air, and he’s much better on the ball than he gives himself credit for. His partnership with Alfie Mawson, when we rose to promotion after being bottom of the table just before Christmas, was just as important for our two trophy wins as Hourihane’s skill and Winnall’s goals. We’d take him back in a heartbeat, if we could only afford his wages.

Like Steve T , marveling at the job Garry Monk is doing dragging well above par performances out of the same 12 or 13 players all season with our bench full of cheap loanees and bum fluff clad youngsters.

It’s a strange one for us Blues fans being placed in the decadent overspenders column. Since 2011 when our owner got nicked for money laundering we have had 6 years of extremely thrifty spending but one fortnight of spending big by our standards in the 2017 summer. Most expensive signing is still only 6 million (Jota) and our starting line up against our beloved neighbours recently cost 40% of one of their players who was sat on the bench, and their starting line up cost around 50 million pounds more .

Also, unlike Bolton we are actually paying other clubs what is due to them. Appreciate none of this is relevant to Barnsley who are a great club.

As for Marc Roberts – disappointing first season in all honesty but so many of our players have been unrecognisable since the last twerp left and Monk took over so I haven’t written him off just yet

Probably good for Monk that he doesn’t have a huge choice of players to pick from. That’s what did for him at Boro, when he was allowed to spend a huge amount on a lot of players, and then went into a state of terminal indecision, switching players and systems on a weekly basis (and often within games). I think it was a relief for him when the axe fell.
Unfortunately, we’re now stuck with Pulisball. It’s just as well that I can’t afford (and, as well, can’t really be arsed) to do the £500 season ticket and £30 return rail trip anymore. I always said that I couldn’t understand how anyone could watch a Pulis team week after week. Still, on the bright side, at least we haven’t descended to the depths of the loathsome Mark Hughes…

What I should also have said was that a recent report showed that most Premiership clubs could now easily get by, financially, with Arsenal style murals around the ground instead of fans, as the gate receipts are a drop in the ocean compared to the TV and sponsorship money. Bournemouth couldn’t spend tens of millions on their gates, for example.

The crunch will be when clubs can get by without the paying supporters and the UK based armchair supporters, because the amount of money that is coming in from the Asian TV/sponsorship market is beginning to dwarf the UK Sky TV money. The one saving grace is that part of the package that sells the English game to the Asian market is the atmosphere from the stands, as unlike many leagues around the world all English teams have sizeable away support which generates the atmosphere. So for now the paying supporter is important to them. But as Sky TV can make programmes featuring dragons and walking dead, surely they’d be able to knock a CGI crowd together. They can then start having games kick off at 3 in the morning for the live Chinese viewers…

Barnsley – We’re doing okay so far. Playing some lovely football at times. Fans of most teams we have played this season have named us as the best team they have faced and are tipping us for promotion, which is a sharp contrast to last season, when we were in the Championship, whereby opposition fans, after one of our rare victories, could only comment that it’s the worst their team has played all season and they shouldn’t be losing to ‘teams like Barnsley’. That’s typical of the short-sightedness of the modern football fan who all seem to think their team belongs in the Premiership.

We do try to point out that Barnsley have spent more time in the second flight of English football than any other club by some distance, but they are only interested in football as far back as the point that some rich foreign businessmen started throwing silly money at their team.

We’ve been in the top 6 pretty much all season, but really should be aiming at the top 2. We certainly haven’t seen any team that I’d consider are any better than us. In fact, having seen Portsmouth at Oakwell I’m flummoxed as to how they are top of the table. The best teams we’ve played have been Luton, Doncaster and Charlton. Sunderland scored 4 past us and missed a couple of sitters, yet for most of that match we were the better team.

But it’s January, which usually means we lose our best players and the momentum that goes with them. We’re still smarting from losing Conor Hourihane, Sam Winnall and James Bree a couple of years ago when we were knocking on the door of the Championship play offs. So far this January we’ve lost Brad Potts and Tom Bradshaw. The latter was a done deal, as we had loaned him to Millwall with an agreed transfer for January, making a mockery of the deadline day back in August. In a similar manner we have signed Cauley Woodrow as his replacement, who has been on loan from Fulham. His goalscoring record for us already suggests we have got the best deal, particularly as Bradshaw is out for the season, so Millwall have effectively paid £1m for a player with a serious knee injury.

Losing Potts was a surprise and is a blow, as he’s one of our better players, even if he has been a little under par recently (due to playing him out of position – why do managers insist on doing this?). We’re bracing ourselves for bids on Kiefer Moore, our leading scorer (who would be in triple figures already if he didn’t need 17 chances per goal), and Ethan Pinnock, our best player and cultured centre back. Whilst I don’t think Moore is destined for a career much higher up the food chain, Pinnock has the class to play much higher.

If we do lose players though we are told replacements will be incoming. Only 5 clubs in the country have richer owners than us (although we are doing things the right way and are operating within our means, unlike most of the clubs we faced in the Championship last season) and we have Billy ‘Moneyball’ Beane as one of our investors, which ties in nicely with our policy of using statistics to bring in top young players to improve and sell on for a profit. We have a decent run of fixtures coming up that should hopefully see us on a run for a promotion push, but at the very least we should be in the play-offs. And then, if we go up, we can enjoy a few relegation scraps until we eventually go back down again. I hate football.

No point in me posting much, I echo everything Paul says, First Barnsley match in 1968, regular supporter since 1974, season ticket holder despite the almost 300 mile round trip from North Norfolk to Oakwell. When I’m not at Oakwell I can sometimes be found watching King’s Lynn in the Southern premier league central division. They’re doing quite well also, 3rd at the moment I believe.

Manchester City, as I grew up in south Manchester and went to Maine Road. Brother is a red, so he had the whip hand for all of the last forty years…see how every MCFC conversation has to either start with a justification or an apology to other cities out there when we are referred to as ‘city’.

Second in the league, still in everythng else, so it’s going pretty well. The match against Liverpool on Thursday was probably the most intense I’ve seen us play since, well, the Aguerooo moment. We rode our luck several times, and who would have known that Bernando Silva could become a terrier-sized midfield terrier.

Still worried about our defence. Mendy appears to be incapable of not getting injured, Kyle has a had a bad wobble on the other flank. Fabien Delph is not a top-class left back, so experienced cover in that area, though unlikely to arrive, would be welcome in January. Laporte though, an absolute beast, and but for Van Dijk the best centreback in the Prem. Textbook lesson, along with Bernardo, of Pep’s gradual integration policy for new signings paying off. Oh, and we’re still reliant on Serge to put them away, no change there.

Liverpool fan since birth. I have no complaints about this season – so far.
Very happy with Herr Klopp, since he was appointed he has proven to be the perfect manager for the club, and as good as Brendan Rodgers is [yes, you read that right, I don’t believe it was just luck, or having Louis Suarez in the team that enabled that team to perform at such a high level – just ask Man United fans whether all you need is a team of talented, highly paid players] Klopp is on another level to him. Even if he somehow manages to leave after not winning anything, his reign has been a success.
This season will, hopefully, end with us [finally] being crowned Premier League Champions, after too many close misses. But, there is a lot of football to be played, Gary, and City aren’t going to give it up easily. If we continue to perform at the level we have set so far this season and have a little bit of luck then I’ll be celebrating with half a million others in Liverpool come May 12th [although I would prefer to have it sewn up on April 13th, at home, versus Chelsea]

Half a million others? Let’s say quarter of a million. I am also a Liverpool fan, feel last Thurs’s game was important. 4 pts is nothing and if it is close last 3 or 4 games, my money would be on City.

Yup. Same for me. Unless we are 4 points up with 1 game to go, my money is on City. God I hope I’m wrong.

2012 I walked into a hotel room and put on the tv. The Premier League season was over. Man U won. All that had to happen was for City to finish losing their game at QPR…
2014 all we had to do was draw with Chelsea then beat Palace and Newcastle…

Fascinating comments so far, thanks all. I feel I should say a bit more about my lot. I’ve been a season ticket holder at Hampton since 1993, having started when I was 13 in 1980. Most of that time we were in the Isthmian League, latterly known as the Ryman or now the Bostik League. Alan Simpson of Galton and Simpson/Hancock/Steptoe fame was our President for many years before his passing a couple of years back. Hey, he even brought me a pint once! We’ve never really hit the headlines for FA Cup Glory, the closest actually coming this season when we led Oldham Athletic 1-0 for 80 minutes in the First Round before being hit by two late sucker punches. Ah well, the money we got from BT Sport for being live on TV was £75,000 which might not seem much to those who support the big guys but for us it’ll pay for a few much needed ground improvements which might allow us to go up if we ever win the league or a playoff final…we’ve now had three defeats in three appearances over about 12 years.
Portsmouth have been mentioned by Paul as being a side near the top of their division…we sold Jamal Lowe to them and are desperately hoping he is sold this transfer window as we have a sell on clause.
Anyone see the Woking v Watford FA Cup game yesterday? 6 of Woking’s starting XI have played for us, 4 of them last season!

Not really been a football “fan” since I was 13/14 years old and went to all the home games….. my team being Sheffield United (so the less said today on how we are doing the better….).

I was always more interested in rugby and cricket anyway and when I went to Uni in Manchester, started watching Sale and so football was very much forgotten about. However since moving to Singapore, I’ve followed what’s going on with regard to results / match reports and so generally I would say Sheffield Utd are not doing too bad at the moment (yesterday’s results notwithstanding). My kids are now teenagers and being born here with no town allegiance are fans of the big boys – Man U and Chelsea respectively. My eldest does watch the Sheffield United games occasionally (which is more than I do) and comments the the Championship Football is better than the Premier League to watch (although I still think he only watches it to stop his brother watching Chelsea…..)

So for me its Rotherham United – firmly bolted down near the foot of the Champ where we will no doubt stay for the remainder of the season. We operate on by far the lowest budget of any of the team in this division and I just love being the underdog. Never more so than when we got thrashed 7-0 by Man City yesterday (were you there @moseleymoles ?) which just emphasised how far the gulf is now between the top of the Prem and what we do – according to some who went we didn’t even play that badly. I went to watch Spurs v Wolves the other week and the speed and accuracy was frightening compared to what Im used to. Seeing top athletes in the flesh, as it were, beats TV hands down very time – be it football, tennis, athletics.

Living down south I don’t get to see my team very much although my daughter has just started at Sheffield Uni so at least I now have real excuse for going up t’North. One thing that has helped is iFollow which is an app which gives you live commentary and videos etc – with that and a thriving Whatsapp group makes Saturday afternoons really entertaining , and I can even combine it with doing other things.

Overall loving footie at the mo’ (City aside) and have even treated myself to Sky Sports and 55″ telly – Get In !!

If you’re in, or close to, London, Rotherham have a London branch of the supporters club. I moved back north in 2008, but the Rotherham lads were a great bunch. We used to meet up with them a couple of times each year to play pool, as we were both in the APFSCIL pool league. I seem to recall Rotherham whitewashing us 9-0 one game. But look them up. Mick Walker and Dave Baistow were my points of contact, but I’ve long since lost their numbers.

@feedback_file – we went to the Eitihad twice in Dec for the Bournemouth and Hoffenheim games so gave Sat a miss, went last year for the 3rd round v Burnley. The cheaper tickets always make for a good atmosphere, lots of kids in. I think if the fixture had been in mid-Dec we might have been fair game, but the evidence is that after playing Liverpool is we are in a post-wobble hyperfocused state. Sorry.

Southend United, for historical reasons. Haven’t watched them for about 5 years, not living anywhere near Southend, but theirs is always the first result I turn to. Currently hovering around the middle of Div.1 and out of the FA Cup, which is normal. They haven’t attracted the attention of any dodgy billionaires, which is something I suppose.

My son-in-law is a rabid fan of Coventry City, also hovering around the middle of Div.1. Unlike Southend, they have fallen quite a long way from their great days; like Southend, they have also clawed their way back from Div.2. So we exchange a fair number of texts on Saturdays…

He happens to live round the corner from Brisbane Rd, so he mostly watches Orient these days. They’re busy picking themselves up and trying to bounce straight back out of the National League, and he sees a lot of good football, he says. I’m wondering whether to follow Dover Athletic, who are in the same league…

Have you read Roots to the 92, a book by a huge Sarfend fan? Also a very good page on Facebook. I remember my first visit to Roots Hall in 1992, the Saturday before Christmas, hammering down with rain and we were on the open end, it’s the coldest I’ve ever been at a football match and to cap it all off Stan Collymore got a hat-trick in a 3-0 drubbing. Still to see us win at your place…

No, missed that, thanks for the heads up @harry tufnell. I’ll get a copy, particularly since he’s giving all his royalties to charity at the moment.

The son-in-law is no great fan of Roots Hall either, although flogging down to Southend on a wet Tuesday night to watch his team lose probably had something to do with that. I must go once more before they finally move to their lovely pie-in-the-sky ground on the ring road, although given the number of years they’ve been talking about it I won’t hold my breath…

Spurs supporter here – as were my father and grandfather etc…etc. Obviusly delighted with how the team has developed over the last few years and we play some sublime stuff at times. Also proud that this has been done without the aid of a wealthy benefactor/ologarch/oil rich country throwing money at us.

Leeds here. If we can keep our manager then we will probably be promoted. Not sure how I feel about that. However the football has been “on another level, Brian” since Bielsa came here so that is enough for me.

Been a while since I’ve heard a Leeds fan say that. It’s usually the other way round and the manager trying to keep his job. It’s said that, wherever you are in the country, you’re never more than 10 yards away from someone who’s managed Leeds!

You certainly seem to have improved under this one though. I’d read how highly rated he was when you were chasing him and I was surprised, given what I read, that one of the big boys hadn’t snapped him up.

I don’t follow any big teams though I’m interested to see how Ole does at Man U – if he gets them playing exciting footy again I might watch. I haven’t watched MOTD for years. But I do like going down to Hitchin Town FC, who have a proper little local ground, great (cheap) beer and I can walk home in 15 minutes. We got into the first round the FA cup this year which was really exciting!

Ah Hitchin Town…nice club with a nice ground. I remember going there to see Hampton legend Craig Maskell make his debut for us in about 1998 or 99. His previous game had seen him playing at Wembley for Orient in a playoff final. Hasn’t Hitchin’s manager been there for years?

Craig Maskell was at Reading for a couple of years. Our most expensive signing when he arrived.
Not a bad scoring record (1 in 3), but his time came just before we finally got some ambition with the arrival of Mark McGhee.
He went to Swindon for £25k less then we paid for him, but on the plus side we got Jimmy Quinn

There’s a real sense of “be careful what you wish for” around Ipswich this season. We were hoping that the stars were all aligned and big Mick was coming home, as it’s the first time that we’ve been managerless and Mick was unemployed, but it’s pretty clear now that it’s never going to happen. He’s still got ambitions that he’d be unlikely to achieve with us. He has said in the past that he’d never manage Barnsley because he’s still hero worshipped here and he wouldn’t want to risk that going sour if he failed with us, but there’d be no chance of that, as we’ve sacked many managers who remain popular with us Reds fans.

I had a slight connection through a friend of a friend and word from the inside was that MM wouldn’t get any money but, equally, wouldn’t get sacked. He did the best with what he could and at least had the clout to be able to pick up the phone and get some half-decent players on loan. Unfortunately, as Paul Lambert has succinctly pointed out, that’s no way to run a football club year-on-year. You know you’re in a parlous state when Glenn Pennyfather would walk into the team.

Poor old Glen Pennyfather, periodically voted as the worst Ipswich player ever. Well, maybe not after this season. As others have said, the new manager effect IS taking a long time to kick in but at least Lambert is putting on a positive front. Can’t blame him for many of our woes but he should really play with two up front now.

That’s interesting @Paul_Wad. You may recall the season you got up goLden after beating us on semi final playoffs.First leg was at St.Andrews and you stuffed us 4-0 a mere 3 weeks after we had easily beaten you 3-1 in the league. I went to the second leg at your place which we won but not by The 5 goals needed.It was interesting because Trevor Francis was our manager at the time. He was and is a Blues legend of course. It was our third consecutive playoffs loss and was the start of his demise as our manager. Sullivan post first match publicly slammed him on local radio which was out of order.
His dream of taking us to the promised land never happened. It did the next year under Steve Bruce.

The second leg was a bit of a non-event, as I recall. I can’t remember which order the goals went in, but I don’t recall feeling the comeback was on at any point. It was a great feeling after the first leg when we got back to the train back to London. Partly because we pretty much knew we were finally going to play at Wembley, in the last club game to be held there before they knocked it down, but mainly because we were still alive. I have never been as scared getting away from a ground as I was that day. It was scary enough in the stadium, but then they kept us in the little courtyard, where we were having to watch the skies to dodge the bricks and bottles. When they finally opened the gates we saw the police were holding back 50-60 Brum fans down the bottom of the hill that were trying to get up to us. We asked a bobby which way it was to the station and he directed us down the hill, past these yobs. We had to ask him if there was another way!

He directed us around the ground and we got to the bottom road 100 or so yards further down. We peeked round the corner and decided it was safe to cross over…just as the police started to disperse the crowd by chasing them off, in our ruddy direction. After a little jog and then having to turn and walk back sharply when we turned the corner into groups of Brum fans we finally made it to the station (seriously, it was a bit like The Warriors at times) and had to sneak past the little groups hanging around looking for us. When we got onto the train we could finally relax, but even then, when my mate Big Al took his first bite of the pie he’d bought a lad walking past the window did a double take and shouted ‘fat bastard!’ at him. We decided we didn’t want to go to Birmingham any more!

It all went wrong at Wembley though. We scored, via the crossbar and the keeper’s back, in the first couple of minutes, before getting hammered for the rest of the first half, until Darren Barnard missed a penalty which would have put us back in the lead on the stroke of half-time. People still say ‘what if’ about the penalty, but it wouldn’t have made much difference, as Ipswich played us off the park in the second half too. They’d been the best team in our division all season and had already stuffed us twice, way better than Bolton, who’d ran away with the league. The real ‘what if’ was towards the end of the game. Craig Hignett took over from Barnard and scored a penalty to bring us back to 3-2 and then, with the momentum finally with us Richard Wright made an unbelievable save from Georgi “Barnsley girls are all ugly!” Hristov. Had that gone in we just might have done it, albeit against the run of play over the 90 minutes. But we didn’t, Ipswich ran away and scored another when we’d chucked everything forward and a year later they were in Europe whilst we began the slide to administration (over a debt of £750k we’d borrowed to build a stand, because the bank got twitchy when the ITV Digital deal collapsed!!) and relegation. Some save then @nigelthebald@skirky and @freddy-steady !

Yep, it was a decent save and who knows what might have happened if it had gone in. Those Were The Days indeed.

It was a very good playoff final though and played in excellent spirit. I feared the worst when that early goal went in off Plug but , as you say we were the better team overall. A fantastic season in the Premier League followed but it’s been downhill ever since.

We’re currently at our lowest ebb since I can remember having supported them for 43 years or so. Play two up front please Mr Lambert.

PS My worst footie experience was at St Andrews too, the next season when they did us in the League Cup. Just a horrible horrible atmosphere during and after the game. And they beat us!

Another Argyle fan here. Attended my first game 50 years ago – 1-0 win over Halifax and I can still remember the goal, a 30 yard screamer from Colin Sullivan. Unfortunately I don’t get down to Home Park more than a couple of times a season these days and at the moment you are right it is pretty dire. BUT the hope is still there and maybe one day we will have a half decent team

Reading.
After years of bouncing between the bottom two divisions, we finally got some ambition and started looking upwards.
We managed two seasons in the Premier League and are now languishing * in the bottom 2 of the Championship.
League One beckons …

Always meant to try and get to a game at Reading given that its not a million miles away, as I’ve been to most other grounds in a 25 mile or so radius. Do you subscribe to the legend of 70’s hero Robin Friday then Rigid?

Never saw the man play (mine was the Kerry Dixon / Trevor Senior era when I first started going – not been for a while though)
The stories of the man are the stuff of legend – and his goal against Tranmere Rovers was labelled the best goal ever seen by referee Clive Thomas.
There are some grainy clips on Youtube, and the book The Greatest Footballer You Never Saw is worth a read

Yeah, the book is a good read isn’t it? If Senior and Dixon were your era then we’re probably about the same age. Guessing you’re a SLF fan? I still love all those bands like SLF, Undertones, Ruts etc. Great stuff.

Guilty – I suppose the nom d’interweb is a bit of a clue.
Obviously missed the Punk era first time round, but it came to me in my Metal Years when I was looking for something different (I wasn’t cool enough to be a Smiths fan, or depressed enough to be a Cure fan). The Metal thing waned, but the Punk-y part of my ears has remained.
I can’t truly claim they are the “soundtrack of my youth” because I wasn’t there, but as most of them have reformed and touring the smaller, sweatier venues, and charging decent prices, I’ve seen most of the big names (they’re just a bit larger than before – no less energy or power though)

I’ve fallen in and out of love with football over the years, but as someone who didn’t grow up in a football household or with football mates, never really felt I did it properly. Even at the peak of my football fandom I couldn’t comment on a team formation, didn’t understand the folklore, and always thought that the tribalism that came with it was plain daft.

As a kid in the 80s it always seemed a slightly scary pastime – muddy thugs kicking lumps out of each other on the pitch, slightly less muddy ones kicking lumps out of each other off it. Then Italia 90 kindled my interest and a mate persuaded me to start following my local team, Pompey. That was the 91/92 side with Darren Anderton, John Beresford, Guy Whittingham and Kit Symons and I was a regular at Fratton Park during our cup run which took us all the way to the semi finals. Then they sold my favourite player (Martin Kuhl), jacked up the prices to almost double figures – didn’t help that I’d also grown out of half price rate by that point – and I drifted away, and stopped getting mildly narked if I heard that Southampton had won, which was silly anyway.

I would still watch Match of the Day most weekends but like others here, lost interest in top tier football when money began to distort the game. Did have a spell of watching Wycombe Wanderers, my local team now I’ve settled away from the south coast, but thought I was done with top flight football.

Then World Cup 18 came along and it was my 7-year-old son’s turn to have his curiosity piqued. Inspired by the likes of Harry Kane, Dele Alli and Kieran Trippier in that tournament he decided to become a Tottenham fan, so we’ve started following them this season – we even went to see them play Burnley at Wembley last month, my first ever experience of a Premier League match. My impressions: entertaining – a hell of a lot more so than Wycombe, even in what was a fairly uneventful match – and everyone is tiny (Kieran Trippier is diddy). As commented above, Tottenham are a fun team to follow this season and their manager and players seem to have the right attitude (my favourite is Son). Despite myself I’ve started to get quite into it.

The other day I read a comment below the line on a Guardian article about Tottenham’s form this season. It was to the effect of, “stop going on about Tottenham, they’re just a sideshow, entertaining but let’s face it they never win anything” and I got all indignant. And then I thought – hang on – I’m getting annoyed about something that a guy I’ve never met has written about a football team. What’s happening to me?

Joe, I was living in Fratton during 91/92, whilst a mature student (!) at Portsmouth University. Used to visit Fratton Park for the occasional game to get my football fix and very enjoyable it was too. It was a proper old football ground back then!

I’d like to think it still is, the same way you like to imagine your childhood street has been perfectly preserved – I can picture the old turnstile being exactly how I left it, the gents urinal basically being a gutter in the wall – but I know it’s not like that really. In fact having seen Fratton Park from the outside recently I couldn’t even work out where I used to go in.

They’ve still got the fans though. I saw Pompey playing as an away team at Wycombe a couple of years ago and the travelling supporters totally drowned out the home fans (and clearly rattled the home team).

The dimensions of football players are not subject to the conventional physical laws of the universe – famously Frank Stapleton had multiple contributions to the “player profile” piece in Shoot! and always gave himself a different height, players get given the epithet “Big X” who aren’t really taller than their team mates and, in his tunnel bust up with Patrick Vieira before an Arsenal v Man U game, Roy Keane suggested the France international should stop trying to intimidate Gary Neville and “pick on someone his own size” – Keane and Neville are almost exactly the same height, while Vieira is noticeably taller than both…

Accrington Stanley for about 35 years! Back in the good old days you could walk around the ground at half time and give the opposing keeper stick for a full ninety minutes. Crowds would rarely trouble the 200 mark but most of the players were local lads and you would see them throughout the week. Our stylish striker Dave Parr was a local driving instructor and lived next door to my best mate.
Now in 2019 we are punching above our weight ( As the cliche goes), with crowds averaging the 1500 mark and one of the smallest budgets in the football league. However with John Coleman and Jimmy Bell we have probably the best management teams in the football league and their steering us to last years promotion into League One was genuinely astonishing. With our finances we have to rebuild the squad every couple of seasons and Coleman and Bell manage to find “rough diamonds” to polish and loanees who seem to enjoy their time with the club.
The chairman Andy Holt is a local businessman who has invested wisely in the club facilities to bring the ground up to an acceptable standard but we still have terraces. You can stand up to watch football!
The club is very much a community club, reaching out to youngsters to try and change their alligiance from the fancy premiership types to our moderately successful family. The club and supporters groups treat opposing fans as friends in football and we mingle together prior to kickoff to chew the fat and moan about each others on field problems.
On Saturday at the FA Cup match with Ipswich we had a supporter who flew over from South Korea after reading about us on the internet and we have a small but vocal bunch of Norwegians who turn up a few times a season to get plastered and sing over the tannoy.
Anybody want to come to a match? We have plenty of room to fill!

Stockport County playing their sixth straight year in the Conference North after bankruptcy/mismanagement etc. Now a a part-time club currently third place 4 points out of first, averaging 3700 loyal fans per game. Hopefully this is the start of a return to the Football league. very difficult for teams trying to compete with “bought” millionaire owned hobby clubs like Salford, Fleetwood, AFC Fylde etc etc

Aberdeen. I spent fifteen years freezing to death watching The Dons win exactly nothing. My highlight was going to Hampden to see us losing to Celtic in the Cup Final. Apart from that it was years and years of mid-table mediocrity. Off I went to London and into Aberdeen came Alex Ferguson. Bitter, twisted – nah, not me.
Eventually settled in Norwich, season ticket holder. Lots of exciting times, lots of boring times. Now in France I manage to see at least one home game a year. Last month me, son and grandson saw us score a last-minute winner against Bolton. I cried.
I despair about the current state of our beloved game – watching overpaid prima donnas kissing the shirt badge makes me want to puke but then up pops Pukki in the 94th minute and life can’t get any better

Amazing how things have changed at Carrow Road. When I first started going in the late seventies the 13000 crowd would stand there silent and bitter. Now 26000 every game belting out OTBC. Make or Break Time with a bunch of games coming up (including a 5 nil trouncing of the Old Enemy) that will define the season.

I’m a Brighton fan and have been a season ticket holder since the days of the Goldstone Ground. After years of mediocrity interspersed with several years of being really really shit we’ve finally come (quite) good bobbling along nicely in the middle of the Premier League. Our players still go shopping in the city and are happy to have their pics taken with any spotty herbert’s who come up and ask them. I still think of us as a “little’ club though last Saturday’s trip to Bournemouth did show me that some clubs are still “littler” ! Unlike the clubs mentioned earlier in the thread we’ve not overspent and have kept within the FFP rules. We’ve also never gone into administration and indeed paid a fine to HMRC years ago by selling our goalkeeper to Leeds for exactly the amount of money we needed. The club is run by life long fan Tony Bloom who has paid for the new ground and training facilities (mentioned as being one of the very best in the country) out of his own pocket.

It’s about time you got the new ground. It was nothing short of scandalous the hoops you’ve had to go through. I moved to Brighton towards the end of your time at the Goldstone, and it was in a pretty awful state by the time I went down there. Part of it was condemned wasn’t it. And the Withdean just wasn’t a football ground. Me and some mates went in the hospitality there for a Johnstone Paint Trophy (or whatever it was called in those days) game against Boston United and it was in a prefab building.

I haven’t been to the new ground yet, as my returns to Brighton have never coincided with a game, but my mates tell me the ground is great, but public transport links need improvement. Sadly, your fans who visited Oakwell on your way to the Premiership a couple of years ago got up our noses a bit. After a couple of decades of lower league football I think a bit of success had turned them into thinking they were following Real Madrid. But we’re quite used to people being a bit condescending when they come to Barnsley!

Incidentally, if you’re in the mood for a bit of reminiscing, BT Sports are showing a lot of highlights of old matches from the 60s, 70s and 80s. I’ve just been setting them all to record. I noticed that a couple of games being shown are from your Cup run in 1983. I think it’s the quarter-final and semi-final. I got to know Gerry Ryan a bit when I worked with his sister 10-15 years ago and he showed me his Cup runners-up medal. I daren’t ask him what he said to Gordon Smith when they got back to the dressing room!

@Paul Wad – thanks for that information about our matches being shown on BT Sports – I’ll look into it. By the time we left the Goldstone it was in a dreadful state and you’re correct in that part (the East Stand from memory) had been condemned – I have no rose tinted specs when thinking about the Goldstone Ground at all !
Withdean was part of the “journey” to get back to Brighton and it served a purpose though, as you say, was just not fit for purpose. The Amex is a lovely stadium – luckily I no longer use public transport to get there as that is a nightmare. The club wanted to build a halt there to have a shuttle service for trains running just to and from Brighton but Southern Rail weren’t helpful so we have ended up with what we’ve got.
I can only apologise about the stuck up attitude of some of our fans – it’s true that there is a certain element who just don’t get where we’ve come from and this, shamefully, is not just the Premier League “tourists” who are now infesting the ground. I guess, however, the tourism is the price for success so we have to lump it.
I wish you luck this season – it looks as though you’re in reasonable form and should make the play-offs at least if not an automatic spot.

I was there at the last game at the Goldstone Ground,but in the away end as I’m a Doncaster Rovers fan.
Bit of an atmosphere that day as it was perm any one of 3 teams to get relegated.
Your victory and Hereford’s defeat meant we were safe and it was winner take all in the last match which was (for people who don’t know) Hereford v Brighton!
Brighton won and sent Hereford down.
The following season 1997/98) we recorded possibly the worst set of figures for any team,any season.
Took us until the 21st league game to finally win!!
We won only 4 league games all season and lost a record 34
We scored 30 goals and concede 113!

Somewhere I’ve still got the T shirt from the 97/98 season as it was a bit of a love in between us and Donny and was played on or around Valentines Day. Something like “The heart of football”. Coincidentally I was looking through some old photos today and came across one from the last day at the Goldstone Ground with the Doncaster Rovers players parading around with a banner stating “Rovers players support Brighton fans” which was a nice touch.

I’ve supported Liverpool since I was younger, and the gap between titles wasn’t as wide as it is these days. Having been born in the same decade that Rushie’s moustache first found fame, the Premier League is all I’ve ever really known.

Regardless of whether we win anything this season, Jurgen Klopp has given the fans a reason to enjoy the football again over the past two/three years. I like what he has done since coming to Liverpool, and I wouldn’t swap him or Michael Edwards for the world at the moment.

I hate myself for doing so, but I contstantly find myself seething at the tribalism that goes on below-the-line of the Football Pages. As @Joe_Robert says up above, why should I care what a 16 or 60 year old Man United fan thinks of the club I support. Life would be much better if they turned off the comments sections though, so we didn’t have to witness this never-ending dick waving contest between rival supporters.

Lewes FC. An eccentric and progressive, community owned club with a unique commitment to equality. They are the only club in the world to pay men and women’s teams the same wage and where both teams play at the same ground ( most women’s teams are shifted off away from a club’s home stadium for their matches. ) The men are currently holding their own ( 5th ) in the Bostik league premier division, while the women are, amazingly, in the FA Women’s Championship, the second tier of women’s football, playing the likes of Man Utd. It’s a lovely home ground, The Dripping Pan, on the edge of the South Downs, they serve Harvey’s in the bar, it’s a fantastically friendly atmosphere, and I can take my dog to the match. It’s a real antidote to the money-focused horror of the Premier League and my first love, Arsenal.

Although Hampton haven’t played Lewes for a couple of years I’ve always really enjoyed our visits to The Dripping Pan, which is probably the best named ground in the country! Hope you get promoted this season and we manage to stay up so we can make a return to Lewes, which always seems to be most fans favourite awayday. Do the club still do those brilliant match advert posters?

Those posters are superb, there’s a real wit evident there!
Just as a side question, I wonder what Lewes supporters think of supporters from your near neighbours Whitehawk? They seem to bring pleasure and irritate in equal measures. Bit of a similarity to the Dulwich lot maybe?

I used to live off the bottom of Whitehawk Road, just across from the park where the ground is. There was generally a lot of noise in Whitehawk, whether there was a football match or not. Quite often it was police sirens!

Another Spurs fan here. No connection whatsoever with North London but as a kid growing up in Northern Ireland everyone chose a big English team – in my class everyone was Man Utd or Spurs. That was the time of Greaves, Gilzean, England, Mackay, and Saint Pat Jennings. Over the years decent Spurs teams and players have come and gone – the Hoddle Ardiles and Waddle days; the Gazza/Lineker cup winning side; the famous five of Klinsmann, Anderton, Sheringham et al, GIn – OL – a, etc etc, but the condition of being a great flair team on occasion but never being able to sustain it over a season seems to be deep in the club’s DNA.

Right now is a good time. I really admire Levy for running the club sensibly – investing prudently; not spending stupidly; and allowing the development of a strong academy and a system of bringing young British players through. Pochettino is outstanding and generally admirable – I juts hope we don’t lose him too soon though I would think he’d be more likely to go to someone like Real Madrid than Manchester United. And in players like Kane, Dele, Son, and Eriksen we have a group that are a joy to watch. Let’s hope we can finally win something this season.

Another Spurs fan, man and boy (since about 1963.) However, half my life is taken up by “the other team” mentioned in the OP – the glorious Woking FC.
I first started going in 1990, when I lived in the area, so saw the whole FA Cup run that culminated in The Thrashing of the Baggies (TMFTL, surely?) and the narrow loss at Everton. When we progressed to The Conference, I went, home & away, to every game, for two seasons. We won the FA Trophy at Wembley 3 years out of 4 and then the club let the genius manager, Geoff Chapple go (he was working with no contract, was still an insurance salesman, and all he wanted was a bit of financial stability. He went to the Chairman, immediately after the 3rd Trophy win, and asked if he could go to speak to Kingstonian, as they had offered him a contract….with money and everything! The Chairman said, “Go and talk to them, by all means.” Geoff came back, expecting to be called into a meeting to tell him they would match anything Kingstonian offered. Instead, there was a cardboard box outside his office, with all his personal stuff in, and his office had been emptied.
It is currently good fun supporting both my teams. They are both a joy to watch (has not always been the case with Spurs) and I am enjoying the Pochettino Years immensely.
Woking, with Hampton’s Manager and half their squad – sorry Nick L – are a young, part-time group of players and could well get promoted back into the Conference (National League) at the first attempt.

I do think Woking will go straight back up Niall, either through being champions or as playoff winners. Dowson was an effective manager for us on minimal finance and with Woking’s bigger budget he’ll obviously be even better. If he’d managed to sign a consistent regular goalscorer for us last season we might even have gone on to win the league ourselves instead of Havant. Who knows! I’d like yourselves and Torquay to go up just so it goes back to being a slightly more open league next season. I actually wonder if quite a few clubs in the division have cut budgets for the rest of this season because they’ve realised there’s not a lot of point trying to compete with Torquay and Woking. That’s not to detract from how much better yourselves and Torquay are though.

Another Spurs fan – born in the hospital just down the road. All mum’s family from that neck of the woods and all Spurs fans. I had a season ticket for about 10 years – which started with Klinsmann and the famous 5. All gloriously shambolic. A team that could go to Liverpool and win 2-1 in a titanic cup match or get beaten 4-3 at home to Villa (after clawing back from 3-0 down only to lose it with last kick of the match).
For me the money has sucked a lot of the joy out of the game. But Poch has been a breath of fresh air. He’s created a team with flair and also the sort of backbone not normally associated with Spurs. He’s got them playing well and also punching above their weight.

In a football-related chat the other day (albeit a slightly drunken one), we came to the conclusion that the era of the classic centre forward is over. So many teams in the Prem are crying out for a goal scorer, but there just don’t seem to be many out there. The fact that Everton have spent a combined total of about £50 mill on two strikers (Tosun and Niasse) who would struggle to get in a Championship side says it all.

I’m also annoyed about players who seem to hang around for years, despite not actually playing (hello again to Niasse, who was signed by a manager who left in 2016). I’m similarly annoyed by clubs who sign players with atrocious injury records…who then seem to be genuinely surprised when said player gets injured.

Burnley fan here, but not one of the knobhead ones (I do have to always point this out unfortunately. I know all clubs have their fair share, but we do seem to have more than most).

All good at the turf, this year in the prem has been hard going but I knew it would be after the magic of last year. I do think we will stay up this year (I think there are at least 3 clubs worse than us & it looks like Huddersfield have already laid claim to one relegation spot) but it will be close.

I don’t get to games as much as I used to unfortunately, but I am hoping my little boy shows an interest when he is older so I can take him to Turf Moor. However, my father in law is a city fan so I am sure he will try & influence that!

That was a farce the other day wasn’t it. I’m all for the officials getting the decision right, cos they rarely do these days, but stopping him in his run up? There’s been all the talk about whether it was offside, whether the other player was interfering with play and why it takes VAR so long to reach a decision, but has anybody thought to ask the referee why he gave the penalty in the first place, cos it wasn’t a foul! At least for the second one he actually got kicked before he threw himself to the floor!

Looking at the draw though, losing to you was the best thing, as it’s saved us shipping 10 goals in the next round. And I wouldn’t have wanted us to put any more pressure on your manager, cos he seems to be one of the good guys and I was surprised to hear that some Burnley fans were calling for his head. Some fans can be so fickle these days. I like Sean Dyche. If a grizzly bear could talk, that’s who it’d sound like.

Started watching them in the 88/89 season and for 10 years we seemed to be certs for relegation to the Conference which we finally achieved in 97/98 with one of the worse records of all time (see earlier post)

5 years in the Conference wasn’t that bad and we were the first team to get into the football league via the play-offs,beating Dagenham And Redbridge 3-2 in extra time with a golden goal scored by Francis Tierney.

Went straight up again as Division 3 Champions,having been tipped as relegation favourites.
Three years in the third tier saw us get to the League cup quarter finals and only narrowly losing to Arsenal on penalties (we’d led twice in the game and they equalised in the 119th minute!),winning the football league trophy against Bristol Rovers at Cardiff in 2007 and then the big one. Beating Leeds at Wembley the following year to go up to the Championship.

Five enjoyable years in the second tier then back down to Division 1 for a season which saw us go up again as Champions with (virtually) the last kick of the game at Brentford.
If that had happened in the Premier League it would be shown all the time.

Terrible season back in the Championship which saw us relegated again then again a season later to the bottom tier.
Back up at the first attempt and now in Division 1 for the second season.
Trundling along quite well at the moment.
6th place and into the 4th round of the FA Cup for the first time in 9 years.

Season ticket holder since our return to the league.
Onwards and upwards!!

This is the clip of that last moment at Brentford.
It was 0-0 and as it stood we were going up behind Bournemouth.
Brentford were 3rd and a win would put them in the automatic promotion places and push us to 3rd.
This happened in injury time.
I can watch this forever!!!!!!

Yes, I remember that one. I was at the Liverpool v Arsenal game in 89 and I thought that ending was dramatic, but yours topped it. I wouldn’t rule out another promotion push this season either, as you looked great against us a few weeks ago. As usual, Coppinger ran the match. I think we’ve tried to sign him at every transfer window for the last 28 seasons. One time I really thought he was coming, but it seems like he was using us to get a pay rise. But he’s some player to say he must be in his 50s now, as he seems to have been terrorising our defenders forever.

Thanks Paul.
There does seem to be a bit of a gap opening up now between 7th and 8th.
The standard of football this season has been really good to watch.
A Rovers v Barnsley play-off final at Wembley would be great but obviously one of us would be going home disappointed.
As for Copps,well,he just seems to get better with age.
He’s 38 in a couple of weeks and passed his landmark 600th appearance for the club earlier this season.
Don’t know whether you saw it but he scored a header against Rochdale the other week and has now scored in 16 consectutive years for us

Yes, I saw that on the football league show. Or I should say, the bit of the football league show that I watch, which is usually about 10 minutes of it from the 60 minute mark!

It really is some feat, particularly as he’s been a great player all that time too. With all due respect, you’ve done well to keep hold of him. I’m sure more tempting clubs than us have been sniffing round him. I had a chat with Ronnie Glavin the other day at a Penistone Church game (his son plays for them) and we reminisced about the great Barnsley side of the early 80s that he was a key part of. We went up from the 4th to the brink of the 1st division (if we’d have beaten Norwich at home in the February we’d have ultimately gone up instead of them), with great players like Glavin, Ian Banks, Trevor Aylott and Mick McCarthy in the team.

Contrast that with a couple of years ago, when the team that took us to promotion, after being bottom of the table in December, was ripped apart from the off. We just couldn’t hold on to Alfie Mawson, Conor Hourihane, Sam Winnall, Josh Scowen, Marc Roberts and Marley Watkins, cos we could only afford to pay a fraction of what the other teams were offering them. What made it worse was that, Mawson aside, the rest all went to teams in the same division as us. Hourihane increased his wage about 6 or 7 fold.

Mick McCarthy came through all the junior levels at Barnsley and played over 300 games for us as we moved up through the divisions. John Stones came through all the junior levels with us, played a couple of dozen games for us and we just couldn’t keep hold of him. What’s more, the team he was leaving us for, who were offering the millions and making him a millionaire…was Wigan!!! Fortunately, for him, as well as us, Everton called him whilst he was in the car on the way to Wigan. It just sounds a lot easier on the ears to be financially blown out of the water by Everton, rather than Wigan. Everton then did the same with Mason Holgate a year later, before we started banning any scouts with scouse accents from the stadium.

So keeping hold of Coppinger, in this day and age, where clubs higher up the food chain have money to burn, where every club knows everything about every player and where a move higher up the food chain can make even an average player a millionaire in no time (and there are plenty of those), is some achievement. Either that or some local gangster has threatened to kneecap him if he leaves, as was allegedly the case with a much higher profile player on the other side of the Pennines a few years ago, forcing him to pull out of his big money move down south!

I love football but haven’t been to a live game since I was a child (I am 53).

I follow the results my local team (Oxford Utd) and the team from the county I was born in (Norwich City) just out of interest. I will have 5Live commentaries of most football matches on my radio in preference to music when I am cooking at home and when driving.

Uncle, me too, I have never understood why phone ins such as 606 seem to be so popular. You are definitely not alone on that score. Radio always seems so keen to let listeners “have their say” and I’m not actually sure why. I’d much rather listen to some genuine insight from an expert than some ranting in the aftermath of a defeat. I guess its because phone ins must be so cheap and easy to produce.
Now, if we get on to phone ins like Dannys Baker or Kelly then it’s a different matter, as they can be really entertaining but even they are only as good as the callers they get.

The best call I remember hearing when Danny Baker was presenting 606 in the early days was when somebody called to say they had been watching a match played by disabled people. Apparently, one of the players went to hoof the ball and his wooden leg flew off, prompting Baker to ask the question “can a wooden leg play you onside?”

That’s brilliant! There’s another one that Baker (possibly with Danny Kelly) did where a caller rang in to say his Dad had made him a spinning wooden bow tie in his teams colours, if memory serves. I think it might even be on youtube. Baker goes into hysterics.

Danny B mentions the show regularly on the podcast he does with Gary Lineker. Recently talked about how Alan Sugar had plod come round his house to threaten arrest (Danny had been telling Spurs fans to show their discontent by not buy club merch – and later ‘returning’ the merch via the medium of throwing it out onto the pitch).

If you like the more irreverent phone-ins that Danny baker et al do, his podcast with Gary Lineker is well worth a listen. It’s called “Behind Closed Doors” and is basically just fun football stories & opinion, nothing confrontational like you get on 606, and a reasonable amount of Gazza anecdotage.

I am going through them at the moment and I am enjoying them. Some of Lineker’s anecdotes are fascinating. In a league match against Forest, a different defender was put on to Lineker (it would normally have been his England colleague, Des Walker, who was a formidable opponent ). Lineker correctly assumed that Clough was trying different things in preparation for the FA Cup Final 2 weeks later.

So – in that league fixture, Lineker pretended that he was struggling against the new defender. He slowed down on purpose, allowing the defender to win the ball frequently and allowed him to have a great game. The tactic worked – the defender was placed with Lineker in the final and Lineker hit full throttle and ran rings round him.

In the second half Des Walker replaced the defender, telling him he knew what he was up to but he’s back now.

I have loved Danny Baker for many a year, but in this show I find I want more Lineker stories. Yesterday’s podcast had a question form a listener along the lines of “when you’re a player, what happens when…”. Danny launches into a long story about a Sunday morning park game he played in the late 60\s. And then Linelker, with not a lot of time left, rattles through what happened in the World Cup semi final in 1990! It’s possible, the “when you were a player” questions are more directed at Lineker – I’d have thought.

I liked when Baker launched into a game of hand shake poker (i.e. who is the most famous person you have met) and threw down his hand – the Beatles. Which I guess he uses to bulldoze most rooms.
Then Lineker said one time whilst in LA he’d gone to a dinner with Steven Spielberg and that one of the director’s close friends had joined them – the friend was one Barbra Streisand.

Do you still have the Beast up front for you? I had a chat with him recently when he was signing his book at Oakwell. He doesn’t seem to like Phil Brown very much! We never played him up front when he was at Barnsley, just at centre back. But I think his love of the local hostelries did for him, as we already had a bit of a drinking culture in the squad at that time, so we shipped out a lot of those players. I was pleased to see him doing so well throughout his career, but at the same time was wishing he was scoring all those goals for us.

Bristol Rovers for me, the mighty Gas. I’ve been watching them since I went to Uni in Bristol in 1980 and got my first bedsit just down the road from the hallowed ground of Eastville. Since then we’ve moved to Twerton Park in Bath and then back to the Memorial Ground in Bristol. Late 80s were our peak with promotion to the second division under Gerry Francis but we’re struggling in League One at the moment and haven’t played C*ty in a league game for about twenty years, a derby to match any in Britain. We’ve made playoffs at Wembley over the years and had our fair share of decent players John Scales, Nigel Martin, Barry Hayles, Marcus Stewart, Neil Etheridge, Nathan Ellington. And our club song is Goodnight Irene, quite a thing to hear 40,000 Gasheads sing it at Wembley.

We’re top at the moment, but I’m not expecting it to last. The squad is over stretched and we seem to be getting an injury a week. Bielsa has been great, we are playing attacking football & receiving plaudits. The trouble is going up, what would be the point ? We are miles away from being in a position to compete (we lost 1-4 to WBA which put our squad in some perspective) and I don’t believe the club’s ownership is stable enough. The chaos theory is always there when talking about Leeds United.

Glory hunting 70s born Liverpool “fan” here. I don’t follow them much, but keep an eye on the scores. If they don’t win it this season, it’ll be a shame because of the strong start.

I keep more of an eye on Charlton, having gone to see them loads when at school and since (a good mate of mine has supported them for years). They’re going well seemingly without doing anything spectacular, and are nicely seated in the League 1 playoffs. More interestingly there may be a takeover imminent, replacing the Belgian system (headed by Roland Duchatelet) they’ve had for some years now (which is unpopular with many fans). It will be interesting to see what happens next. Can’t see anyone getting past Portsmouth (my Dad’s team) to win League 1 though.

As a supporter of a non prem team (the mighty Millers) I do feel that we no longer have 4 divisions as but 2 separate competitions separated by a glass ceiling- The Premiership and the rest of the Football League and the gap between the 2 is growing ever wider due very simply to money. I think most teams from Leagues 1 ,2 and even the top levels of non league can realistically aim to progress into the Championship (albeit maybe struggling at the bottom end). The move up to the Prem though is one that I certainly cant imagine I’ll ever see for my team and there are probably only a handful of ex Prem teams who can expect to go back up and maybe survive. So whilst I am enjoying our time in the Champ its only ever going to be about survival. There was a time not so long ago when the likes of Carlisle, Wimbledon and even Barnsley were in the top flight but I cant see that happening again.

I agree…mostly! TV money has caused this. In one way it’s always been the case that the richer teams tend to do better, but you didn’t used to get the sudden cash influx into clubs which has accentuated the money effect. I used to think that no one again could just brilliantly coach a side to success like, say, Brian Clough did…but then along came Leicester! Also…teams do still get into the top flight and survive, like Brighton, Bournemouth, Watford etc. What is far less likely is that a ‘big’ team will go down.

Don’t be suckered into the romance of teams like Bournemouth and Leicester getting promoted and doing well. They overspent big time to get up there. For every team like that there’s a few that plummet into administration because the gamble didn’t pay off.

I’d actually go further that what FF said and suggest that there are two glass ceilings. One under the top 7 in the Premiership and one about 2/3 of the way down the Championship. Below the top 7 just about any of those teams can finish 8th one season and then bottom the next. Whereas in the Championship there are teams that are run within their means (I.e. the ones in the relegation battle) and the rest are either flush with parachute payments or rich/stupid owners piling the cash in with scant regard for FFP regulations.

Barnsley have traditionally been a lower mid-table second flight club, with the odd flirtation with promotion and quite a few relegation battles, but as the money side of things has taken over in the past 15 years or so we are having to accept our new place as a yo-yo club between the second and third flights. The irony at the moment is that only 5 clubs in the country have richer owners than us, but I really don’t think I’d be comfortable if we just tried to buy success, so I have been much more comfortable with the proper way we’ve gone about things in recent years, even if deciding you have a favourite player is about as worthwhile as having a favourite character in Game of Thrones or the Walking Dead.

Thank you one and all, I really do feel amazed and strangely humbled by such a huge response! I’d have been happy with any response quite frankly. It shows what a friendly community this is.
Just so you know, in celebration I have just eaten a (whole) packet of beef puffed Hula Hoops in lieu of the hamper suggested by Mr. Lodestone…

Yeah – it’s not as easy as this all the time. You start a thread about Faroese nose-flute ensembles, rather than about football, and see how many responses you get. People won’t be clamoring to join the thread then – no sir.

Talking of Moose – don’t tell me he has gone off into the wilderness (aka the real world) as well? At this rate Nick L will be wandering our corridors anxiously enquiring “Anybody there, anybody there?”

You scared him off, Lodestar, with your suggestion that he might have to do some actual graft on your AW poll project. Haven’t you been paying attention to the workshy fop’s comments these last few years?

A late entry here – a West Ham fan of some 50 years. My dad was a Millwall fan but was kind enough to let me find my own way. I used to go a few times a season, even had a season ticket for a while but cost and the time it took to get there overcame me in the end. Yet to visit the new “home”

I don’t get this “primal Donna” stuff. The UK has the best domestic league in the world bar none. We are the envy of the rest. I’ve spent the week with a mix of German and Dutch colleagues who see the Prem League as something much better than they get to see. By co-incidence, we have been mixing with the squads with a few of the Asian Cup who are staying at the same hotel in Dubai who have been delighted to talk about the Premier League. Yes, there are some self important cocks playing in the PL but you aren’t watching it, you are missing some great football,

My football allegiances are to Ioswich Town and Woking. I am not sure when I nailed my colours to the mast for good (there was a brief period following QPR) but it was certainly well established by the time Ipswich played Leeds four times to win an FA Cup quarter final in the 1974/75 season. Listening to those games on the radio was very exciting. I have no connections with Ipswich.

Woking is the only decentish side with a 10 mile radius of where I spent most of my childhood. As a young man in my mid- 20s they started to do well. The WBA FA Cup game at the Hawthorns is the greatest footballing day I have experienced live. By then I was all growed up and had been living and working in Woking for many years. When each goal went in, there was pandemonium among the smallish group of Woking fans there. I kept spotting people I knew by sight – shop workers, bus drivers and people I had seen in pubs. Handshakes (even hugs) were exchanged in the weeks following because you’d see them again and proper introductions were made.

The next round involved a trip to Everton and narrowly losing 1-0. A few months later, in the summer, Everton played a pre-season friendly with Woking. The full first team came down (along with several hundred fans, amazingly) and won easily. It was quite thrilling being at Woking’s small ground and seeing Beardsley and chums close up.

Wolves – first game in 1969, which was more famous for being the last game of Peter Knowles career. Followed them up and down the divisions, particularly enjoying the early Bully years at the end of the 80’s when his consecutive 50 goal seasons kick started our revival from the depths of the old division 4.
Currently basking in the joys of watching us (from afar) consolidating in the top flight after last years Championship title – probably my favourite season ever.

Bit of a result.
Finding myself in London on Monday 28th I thought I’d find a non-league game to go to in the evening.

Better than that.
Barnet v. Brentford – F.A. Cup 4th Round.

For … erm … that’ll be the 10 (ten) pounds … on a proper terrace!
Not, of course, to be confused with a “I’ve paid £80 for a seat so I’ll stand up to convince myself I’m a REAL fan and not remotely showing myself to be a complete spanner” job … see Chelsea, Arsenal, Tottenham, Man. Utd. etc. etc.
Why do they do that?

Beats Arsenal Reserves v. Manchester United Reserves on every level, and may turn out to be that rarest of breeds … an F.A. Cup tie after Christmas that both teams want to win and, by definition, an F.A. Cup tie after Christmas worth going to.

Cracking weekend for my Canaries! A win on friday night and two losses for Leeds (my childhood team) and Sheffield U. Watching Norwich on Match of the Day can be bittersweet, but we have a real chance of going up I think. Just wish that our dear friends in Sunderland could be there with us. Look up the Friendly Cup, if you want to know what I am running on about. I was there at the final in 1985, 500 a side in the carpark before the game. Love those blokes. Peace.

Rangers. Very impressed with young Gerrard and his staff – undoubtedly over-achieved relative to expectations in Europe and still very much in the mix in the league, which hasn’t been the case at this stage in the season for a long time. Convincing Old Firm victory just before the winter break was another box ticked.

Unbelievably, the BBC think the spirit of the F.A. Cup is to be found in Chelsea (Panorama programme pending on crook Abramawotsit – well done the British Parliament and democracy on that by the way) v. Sheffield Wednesday at 6 p.m. on a Sunday.

Hapless, and frankly pointless, Spurs are out.
Are they the new Arsenal?
Indeed, is it possible to tell Arsenal and Tottenham apart anymore?

Wednesday 8th May 2019 … a.m. … spare a thought for Manchester United supporters this morning.

Saddled with a ho-hum manager because the board aren’t strong enough to stand up to the supporters, a year of Sunday/Thursday fixtures to look forward to, and Liverpool – after beating Barcelona 4-0 – are now favourites to reach 6 European Cup wins compared to Man. Utd’s three.

Awkward, but, I think you’ll agree, hilarious.

These are the days when supporting one of the big clubs is a bad, a very bad, idea.
Doesn’t happen to Crawley Town or Wycombe Wanderers fans.

“Hilarious” ? I think you’re understating it a tad there.
A year of Sunday/Thursday fixtures and either their “noisy neighbours” or their most hated rivals winning the Premier League. Could not happen to a nicer bunch.
On a very similar theme many thanks to Crystal Palace for a) 6 points this season and b) beating Cardiff last Saturday and helping to keep BHAFC in the Premier League for another season. Must have hurt.